Monday, August 25, 2008

Delay's Hail Mary

For those of you who aren't familiar with Tom Delay, he's basically a corrupt politician from Texas who, among a lot of other things, resigned in disgrace from the House a few years ago when money laundering charges were brought against him.

It appears he has a new defense strategy. You see, when he and his buddies laundered the cash, they didn't hand each other physical dollar bills ... they handed each other checks. Seriously, I'm not making this up. From The Statesman:

Money-laundering charges against former U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and two indicted co-conspirators may be dismissed because the 2002 campaign finance case involved checks and not cash, a lawyer for DeLay said Sunday night.

Apparently in 2005 the law was ammended to specifically include checks, and Delay's lawyers are arguing that because checks were not specifically included in the language before then clearly it wasn't illegal.

Oh.

Please.

If this is the best Delay's team of lawyers can come up with, then the case against him is more open-shut than I thought, which is saying a lot.